Finding safe harbor - for a while

Escape to Savannah provided equal parts stress and relief

EDITOR’S NOTE: Hurricane Helene made it clear that my Substack should stay dark for a few days. We were fortunate — but it sure didn’t start that way on Thursday night…

With Hurricane Helene bearing down on us — hell, it looked like the damn thing was coming down Tallahassee’s Bannerman Road — and all our local weathermen guessing at what time it was going to make landfall and The Weather Channel’s Jim Cantore hollering at us about how many of Tallahassee’s canopy road trees were going to come down, Liz and I wolfed down a hasty dinner Thursday night and decided to look for safe harbor.

The Westin Savannah Harbor Golf & Resort Spa - pre-Helene

We found it — fortunately — four hours later at The Westin Savannah Harbor Golf Resort & Spa in Savannah, Georgia, located — not particularly conveniently — at the other end of the Edmund Talmadge Bridge, perhaps the only free unofficial roller coaster ride in the state.

Since the bridge soars 574 feet above the Savannah River and gives you an extraordinary panoramic view of the Savannah area — if you are brave enough to look — it was probably a good thing that it was dark and rainy my first time over the bridge. At the time, I was unaware that if prevailing winds were over 30 MPH — which they would be in a bit — the bridge was so close to the Earth’s stratosphere that they’d shut the whole thing down.

Fortunately for us, though Helene was sending up plenty of foreshadowing rain, we were just a bit ahead of her soon-to-follow hefty winds and slid into the parking lot after about thirty left turns some time after midnight.

The view from the passenger’s seat going over the Edmund Talmadge Bridge

For some reason, Tallahassee has almost always had a fairly charmed history with hurricanes so far, something that Cantore reminded us about over and over, as if to suggest that was all about to change, that’s why HE was here. After listening to a few hours of that and local weather guesswork, knowing you can’t do a thing but sit and fret and wonder if you were going to blow away like the witch at the end of the Wizard of Oz, it seemed the only sensible thing to do was get the hell out of dodge.

But driving four hours, much of it in the rain, wondering what will be left of your home of 32 years in a few hours, is not exactly a pleasant drive. On the way, we listened to the Toronto Blue Jays-Boston Red Sox baseball game so we didn’t have to worry out loud, occasionally checking so many threatening weather bulletins and updates and updates of the updates that we finally shut the radio off. Would we still have a house in a few hours?

Once we got in Room 925, we started to hear the wind howling, the rain picking up and since the Savannah River was immediately adjacent to the hotel — you could just about knock out a window with a long enough oar — we wondered if we headed in the right direction? Was Helene tracking us down like Dog The Bounty Hunter?

By morning, the sky was gray, the rain and wind had stopped and Helene was getting closer to Tallahassee. There was some wobbling, they said, but if you had on the damn Weather Channel and saw the radar, you never saw so much green. It blanketed the entire Big Bend area. And Helene, as giant as it was, seemed in no great hurry, delaying its arrival just to make sure scare every Floridian to his/her bones.

Our local weather guy said it’d probably make landfall around 11 p.m. but should we stay up to see it? The Weather Channel kept showing a couple of poor rain-soaked, wind-blown jokers in either Cedar Key or a boarded-up downtown Perry, each trying to file their reports from an empty rain-soaked parking lot. Personally, it would have fine with me to have them looking out the window from the Econolodge, sipping a beer or something, but the Weather Channel wants their reporters wet, I guess.

After a fitful attempt at sleep, I woke up at 2 a.m., saw that Helene had made a turn all right, back towards poor Perry, a town already blitzed by two previous hurricanes in the past 13 months. The thing was, the hurricane was fierce enough and wide enough that we weren’t sure what would happen to us in Tallahassee.

It was quite the scene in Room 925. Open, barely filled suitcases on either dresser, the Weather Channel on the TV, I pulled up Tallahassee’s WCTV and my neighbor Mike McCall on my computer and we sat there staring at the double doses of bad news, rain and gale-force winds. Yes, Mother Nature was dumping her nastiest crap on the Sunshine State and there was nothing we, or Jim Cantore could do about it.

The next morning at breakfast in the Aqua Bay Restaurant in the hotel, we found out about the 30 MPH deal with the bridge, that sometimes workers had to stay overnight on Hutchinson Island. Considering the kinds of winds we were hearing about, we wondered if we might be there ourselves for the foreseeable future.

After learning of that, then trying to have a calm, relaxing breakfast, occasionally looking out the window at the calm waters of the Savannah River, suddenly, startlingly, this gynormous cargo ship came leisurely floating by. It was so big and long, you couldn’t imagine how the thing would float. And wasn’t the ship’s captain aware that Helene was headed towards this part of the world? Something that massive probably would laugh at a mere hurricane. Notice the guy in the picture? You see how big it is!

This cargo ship, direct from Liberia via New York City, came rolling through on Saturday.

But nobody was laughing in Florida. Or Georgia. Or South Carolina. Even North Carolina. The more we watched The Weather Channel, the worse it seemed to get. As it turned out, Savannah got a healthy dose of rain and wind — some traffic lights out and lots of leaves and branches tossed on the sides of the road — but that was it.

Almost as if Mother Nature felt guilty for all she’d done, Saturday night in Savannah was serene, picture perfect, as nice an evening as one could imagine. We sat outside for hours, something unimaginable the days before, watching kids burn marshmallows trying to make smores, kids playing tag (I didn’t know that was still done), parents walking around with glasses of wine, chatting happily, merrily, almost that the weather had passed us by.

It was only on the way home Saturday afternoon, the four-hour plus trek down 95, then I-10, that we could see how disruptive the storm had been. Of all the highways I’ve ever traveled, Florida’s I-10 is as flat, as straight and as boring as an insurance seminar. Seeing pine and oak trees wrenched from the Earth, some snapped in half for mile after mile after mile, made you realize that even with all our technological advances and weather forecasters stretched from here to Pensacola and back, when it comes to determining EXACTLY WHERE this gigantic storm was going to wind up and what part of the state it was going to ruin and tear apart, your guess was about as good as theirs.

Seeing all those trees ruined made me think of Henry Thoreau, who treasured trees like old friends. He once wrote each town should have a primitive forest of five hundred to a thousand acres “where a stick should never be cut for fuel, nor for the navy, nor to make wagons, but stand and decay for higher uses—a common possession forever, for instruction and recreation.” He would have been in tears, I’m sure.

While you can make a great and important case for local TV and the damn Weather Channel warning every single soul within earshot about the awfulness on its way for non-stop hours at a time and keep us watching these poor fools standing out in the middle of a storm to show us how bad it is, the “experts” don’t know exactly what’s going to happen any more than you do.

This is not to say that they shouldn’t do it. Maybe the Weather Channel’s warnings caught the ear of enough people in Perry — who ought to be able to take a hint, after all — but those poor folks in Asheville or Boone up in North Carolina, should they have been sweating a stone-cold Florida-bound Helene, too?

Sure, we are incredibly grateful that once again, Tallahassee managed to elude hurricane havoc, us in particular. But we also got a look at what it did do and how lucky we were to escape. This time.

From what I read in the papers, it seems like lots of incredibly wealthy people these days are spending all kinds of their play money to see what it’s like in space or what the Titanic really looks like or financing rockets to Mars or Jupiter.

Maybe there’s no way, technologically speaking, to impact our weather or find scientific ways to re-direct some of these hurricanes. But having seen just a hint of the destruction Helene caused, you’d like to think somebody out there is trying to do something. Something, that is, besides pray.